Stockholm Syndrome

I'm going on to PICU for my last stint of it during residency, considering the job that I'm taking it will actually be my last month of it EVER. I have mixed emotions regarding this. Stockholm syndrome is a phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. I've found time and time again that when placed in an overly "abusive" environment I begin to identify with the "abuser", in this instance it's the PICU, other times it has been Wards. It's odd, but while I know it's a punishing environment I begin to love it a little, to look forward to the intensity. Am I crazy? I think it's a coping stratagy, I do this with attendings who stress me out...typically I find myself trying to emulate them in some way. I think this attitude developed from being picked on in high school, I adapted and “survived” by becoming more similar to the people slinging the shit. Maybe I was born with this behavior in my blood, who knows.
I’m nervous before going into the PICU. It’s not that I’m scared that I will hurt a patient or that they will die, it’s what I’m going to see. The last time I was in the PICU was over a year ago, yet there are patients I still see vividly.
There’s the kid who drowned, but lived enough to be a vegetable on a ventilator. How about the kid who was hit by a car and his brain got infected leaving a huge bucket of puss where his brain should have been. Sadder yet is the kids who look like my sons, there’s the four year old who playing with his brother mildly hit his belly on the couch and started bleeding internally, he was diagnosed here with a very aggressive metastatic tumor of the kidney, I still remember his name and his parents faces. How about the kid who came in with headaches and fever an MRI scan revealed that his brain looked like swiss cheese, a fungus was eating him alive. I could go on and on. It’s a little like going to war I imagine. I’m a little nervous about working there, but much more overwhelming is the dread I feel in the proposition of carrying more of these stories around with me at the end of the month.

Paradoxically, mixed in that fear/dread is a sweat taste of hard work, earning my keep, helping people…somewhere in there is mixed a little love for the PICU…and that makes me wonder if I’m going insane.

Newbie Doc